Although applicable to any system that that uses digital to analog conversion, the present invention will mainly be described in combination with multi-architecture or segmented digital-to-analog converters or DACs.
Today DACs are used in a wide variety of electronic devices. DACs are used everywhere, where digital values have to be converted into currents or voltages. A possible application for DACs are e.g. wireless devices, where a communication controller provides digital data signals, which have to be converted into analog signals to drive an antenna of the wireless device.
A plurality of different DAC architectures exist today. Therefore, for a given application the most adequate architecture can be selected. However, sometimes a single architecture is not the most adequate or does not yield the desired results.
In such cases, two or more DACs of different configurations or architectures can be combined into a segmented DAC or multi-architecture DAC.
When designing a DAC for a specific application, usually the bit depth of the DAC and the conversion rate are predetermined and the respective DAC is specifically designed to comply with these predetermined parameters. Such DACs offer only little flexibility.
Accordingly, there is a need for more flexible DACs.